Saturday, 16 January 2010

The horror, the horror!

I finished Heart of Darkness.

Also this afternoon I raced through 7. William Fiennes's The Music Room which I'd won through dovegreyreader. It's a beautiful-looking book and his writing about physical happenings is gorgeously observed, but I do wish he'd planned it out a bit better first, thought harder about how he was alternating the sections of the book, etc. It sort of reads like a first draft, before you move all the paragraphs around to give it flow, and he also does seem to get a bit confused about tense. I sense that this was to summon various dramatic moods, and I can see what he was trying to do, but again a re-read by him or an editor might have pointed out that it just made it quite hard to place the action. It's not that I didn't enjoy it - I'm just pretty sure that it could quite easily have been a fair bit better.

I started 8. Walden (Thoreau) a couple of days back and it's quite compelling, though not the most cheerful read. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation - ho hum.